In September 2020, a North Korean hacking group known as Lazarus broke into a small Slovakian crypto exchange and stole virtual currency worth some $5.4 million. It was one of a string of cyber heists by Lazarus that Washington said were aimed at funding North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.
Several hours later, the hackers opened at least two dozen anonymous accounts on Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, enabling them to convert the stolen funds and obscure the money trail, correspondence between Slovakia's national police and Binance reveals.
In as little as nine minutes, using only encrypted email addresses as identification, the Lazarus hackers created Binance accounts and traded crypto stolen from Eterbase, the Slovakian exchange, according to account records that Binance shared with the police and that are reported here for the first time.
"Binance had no idea who was moving money through their exchange" because of the anonymous nature of the accounts, said Eterbase co-founder Robert Auxt, whose firm has been unable to locate or recover the funds.
Eterbase's lost money is part of a torrent of illicit funds that flowed through Binance from 2017 to 2021, a Reuters investigation has found.
During this period, Binance processed transactions totalling at least $2.35 billion stemming from hacks, investment frauds and illegal drug sales, Reuters calculated from an examination of court records, statements by law enforcement and blockchain data, compiled for the news agency by two blockchain analysis firms. Two industry experts reviewed the calculation and agreed with the estimate.
Bitcoin slumped below $30,000 for the first time since July 2021 on Tuesday as cryptocurrencies track sinking markets with investors spooked by aggressive US monetary tightening and surging inflation.
The world's largest cryptocurrency by market value fell as low as $29,764 in Tuesday trade, before recovering above $30,000, extending a recent collapse in price as investors desert assets viewed as risky.
Bitcoin's value has more than halved since a November surge that saw the token hit a record of nearly $69,000.
While crypto enthusiasts view bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, an influx of more traditional investors tend to view it as a riskier asset.
They have been offloading bitcoin and other digital tokens along with other volatile assets like tech stocks as the US Federal Reserve moves to hike interest rates to tackle decades-high inflation.
"Bitcoin is breaking below some key technical levels as the never-ending selloff on Wall Street continues," said Edward Moya, senior market analyst for the Americas at Oanda.
"The institutional investor is paying close attention to bitcoin as many who got in last year are now losing money on their investment," he added.
While the token's "long-term fundamentals have not changed in months", concerns about growth and a possible recession are creating "a very difficult environment for cryptos", Moya said.
"No one is looking to buy the crypto dip just yet and that leaves bitcoin vulnerable here."
The slump in crypto follows dives on US equities and other markets, with the tech-rich Nasdaq closing down 4.3 percent on Monday, the S&P 500 declining 3.2 percent and the Dow ending off 2.0 percent.
The United States, Britain, Europe and Canada announced new sanctions on Russia on Saturday, including blocking certain lenders' access to the SWIFT international payment system, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Crypto exchange Binance is blocking the accounts of any Russian clients targeted by sanctions, it told Reuters on Monday, but will not freeze the accounts of others after Ukraine called for a block on Russian users at major digital currency platforms.
"We're blocking accounts of those on the sanctions list (if they have Binance accounts) and ensuring that all sanctions are met in full," a spokesperson for the company said on Monday, declining to give further details.
The United States, Britain, Europe and Canada announced new sanctions on Russia on Saturday, including blocking certain lenders' access to the SWIFT international payment system, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Sunday he had requested major crypto exchanges to block the digital wallet addresses of Russian users, which allow transactions in crypto coins.
Fedorov, who is also minister of digital transformation, had on Saturday offered a "generous reward" for information on digital wallets held by Russian and Belarusian politicians.
"It's crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians, but also to sabotage ordinary users," he wrote.
A separate Binance representative told Reuters: "We are not going to unilaterally freeze millions of innocent users' accounts. Crypto was meant to provide greater financial freedom for people across the globe."
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said last month it wanted to expand in Russia and neighbouring states. Russia is a major market for Binance, with over 113,000 members of its Russian-language Telegram channel.
Since 2019, Binance has allowed users to deposit and withdraw Russian roubles via payments company Advcash.
Advcash, which is headquartered in Belize, told Reuters that users would be able to continue to make instant deposits and withdrawals on Binance via its digital wallets.
"On our platform, some users may experience limitations arising from sanctions imposed on specific banks," it added.
"Making sure our services are transparent, fully regulated and provided in accordance with all applicable laws is and has always been our top priority."
SAN FRANCISCO: As Bitcoin hovers in the range of $38,000 - $40,000 per digital coiin, billionaire Warren Buffett said that he will not even pay $25 for all the Bitcoin in the world.
Addressing Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting, the ace investor said Bitcoin is not a productive asset and doesn't produce anything tangible, reported CNBC.
"If you told me you own all of the Bitcoin in the world and you offered int to me for $25, I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything,"he was quotes as saying in the report.
"Whether it goes up or down in teh next year, or 5 or 10 years, I don't know. But the one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it doesn't produce anything, "Buffett added.
"It's got a magic to it and people have attached magic to lots of things, "said Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway is back in the market as his conglomerate made roughly $41 billion of net purchases in the first quarter (Q1) this year.
The purchases in the first quarter helped chip away at Berkshire's cash pile, which ended the quarter at $106 billion, the lowest since the third quarter of 2018.
"If you said for a 1 per cent interest in all the farmland in the United States, pay our group $25 billion, I'll write you a cheque this afternoon, "Buffett said.
"If you offer me 1 per cent of all the apartment houses in the country and you want another $25 billion, I'll write you a cheque. The apartments are going to produce rent and the farms are going to produce food,"said the billionaire, adding that Bitcoin will not produce anything.
Bitcoin finished April down by 17 per cent, making it the worst monthly performance this year.
The global crypto market cap is $1.74 trillion and Bitcoin dominates it with a 42.15 per cent share, as per data from CoinMarketCap.
The Vox released an article saying "Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history". Years later it tells you to pay attention to it as an investment. Another example of how wrong media is with predictions. Stick to your plan.
It's mostly a Coin base shill but it proves how awfully wrong and manipulative media can be. Being updated with crypto news could be helpful but it mostly fucks up your investment because of the constant confusion.
The best thing to do would be to consider media as entertainment and never to take any financial decision because of it. Especially Panic selling or fomoing no matter what the experts" say.
Stick to your plan without getting manipulated into selling or buying because of news.
It’s become so common that a website that tracks this bizarre phenomenon has recorded 416 times Bitcoin has been declared dead … and survived. Bitcoin rising from the dead is programmed into its code. Bitcoin will be declared dead many more times because it’s a silent protest that challenges the status quo. 13 years on, Bitcoin is still alive and breathing and roaring back to life.
My own Bitcoin portfolio is down more than $100,000. I am grinning at all the losses.
Here’s what is overwhelmingly misunderstood:
Bitcoin is a religion.
One of the greatest investors of all time, Paul Tudor Jones, snuck a comment into a conversation with another legendary investor, Stan Druckenmiller. This comment changed my understanding of what Bitcoin is.
“Do you know that when Bitcoin went from $17,000 to $3000 that 86% of the people that owned it at $17,000, never sold it?”
John Street Capital on Twitter summed it up beautifully: “86% of the [Bitcoin] owners are religious zealots.” That’s why hedge funds and Wall Street are loving the huge crash in the Bitcoin price and buying more, not selling like retail investors.
The network effects of a technology are huge and explain a lot of the enormous growth we’ve seen in stocks such as Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. Bitcoin has even greater network effects than Web 2.0 tech companies. But Bitcoin also has a fiercely loyal user base that won’t disappear, even when 50% of the value of their investment drops. Bitcoin isn’t dead.
The power of religious user loyalty is misunderstood.
Bitcoin doesn’t need influencers to market itself.
The adult babies saying Bitcoin is dead are influencers looking for clicks. You can’t be angry at adults trying to buy food and pay their bills. I get it.
But Bitcoin is an unconventional technology. It has no payroll, no office, and no marketing team. Bitcoin relies solely on word of mouth to survive and grow. There’s another thing that is missed.
Bitcoin is now a brand.
The Bitcoin car in the Indy 500 shows quietly what Bitcoin is becoming. Bitcoin is more than a brand, though. Bitcoin is a movement. The movement has one message to share… Stop creating money out of thin air and giving it to the elites and institutions.
Bitcoin users are saying nicely, “Give us free markets again.” When the stock market needs to dip because of high unemployment or a global health crisis, let it. As long as markets are propped up with money created out of thin air, inequality will rise.
I figured out why Americans are angry about money.
You can’t blame America. See the problem Bitcoin solves is hard to see when you measure everything (including inflation) in U.S. dollars. The product that is U.S. dollars blinds us from the truth: the poor are getting much poorer.
Don’t believe me?
Check this out. Well-known investor Raoul Pal measured the net worth of average American households. Instead of measuring their wealth in U.S. dollars, he simply changed the denominator to the Fed Balance Sheet. Now, let’s not get into finance talk because that’s boring. The outcome is this.
U.S. households are 130.95% poorer than they used to be.
Guess when two-thirds of the drop in wealth occurred: 2008–2009 during the Great Recession. This is the same time the U.S. government and other major economies all around the world started creating money out of thin air and slapping the label bailout on it to create the illusion. Guess what else happened at this exact same time? Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, launched a silent protest against creating money out of thin air.
So when you see Americans angry about anything money-related, now you know why. The answer isn’t to say Bitcoin is dead. Bitcoin is trying to (successfully, so far) solve the problem. The solution is to reinvent the global financial system so that everybody has access to a bank account via their phone and can transfer the hard-earned currency they created with their time into value they can use to live. Let’s put away the Bitcoin anger.
Let’s fix inequality with financial inclusion. Maybe it’s with Bitcoin as Jack Dorsey says. Or maybe it’s with another technology.
But sitting around with our heads buried in the sand calling Bitcoin dead for the 417th time does nobody any good. “There has never been a statue erected to a critic,” says Jean Sibelius and that’s timely advice.
Bitcoin is the start (not the finished version) of a new financial system.
It’s poetic (if slightly sad) to watch bitcoin crash and smolder while writing this piece. Back in early February, I wrote several posts warning people not to invest in it and to be careful about the hype.
Some people listened. Others assumed I had no right to express skepticism, and a few others even ridiculed me.
You must be red assed over missing the run up from $6K to $38K in the last year, or don’t have the money to invest.
I hate to say I told you so, but more importantly...
I love to say I told you so.
Here’s why:
You can’t trust Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has been teasing and torturing bitcoin and dogecoin holders for months now, making everyone guess what he’s really thinking. Just when everyone assumes they’ve pinned him down, he does something completely unexpected and seemingly illogical.I’ve made this point before, and his cult following likes to scream at me in all caps that I’m some kind of monster.
Immediately, bitcoin rocketed back up thousands of dollars. If you wanted proof that this currency’s value rests entirely on the word of a single, unhinged dude — this would be it.
So, Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have a problem (mis)leading everyone one way or the other. He’s a wildcard, and a danger to anyone with a wallet. If we had any sense at all, we wouldn’t listen to a word he says anymore. He has motives he’s not sharing with the public.
That’s just the beginning…
Cryptocurrency isn’t transparent at all.
Hardcore advocates of cryptocurrency probably don’t care what Elon Musk tweets. It’s the average person who should, though. We’re being sold a narrative about digital currencies revolutionizing the way we handle money, but the deeper you dig into this world, the more it sounds like traditional finance under a new regime, technocrats.
Here’s the thing about the traditional financial system: most people like you or me don’t understand how it works.
That’s not your fault.
That’s the system’s fault. Money shouldn’t be this convoluted or opaque. You shouldn’t have to get a degree in finance or economics to understand how your own bank account functions beneath the surface. There shouldn’t be a sea of narcissists and sociopaths working against you while you sleep at night. Predators have made it this way. They’ve created tiered systems and lexicons that prevent us from earning wealth.
My point in writing these articles is to call out the lack of transparency in how any financial system works, crypto-based or otherwise. I study linguistics, and I get a headache reading the fine print about blockchain.
That’s not a good sign.
If there’s one major take away from linguistics and language studies, it’s that entities can make language dense and obscure on purpose in order to leverage power over others. This is what control-hungry people do. They don’t just dominate through violence. They dominate through language. For example, one reader got mad at me in February:
Have you even heard of the term crypto-economics? Do you realise thats what the innovation is here? Probably not as you admitted earlier you don’t know what you’re talking about. Currency being the first application of blockchain technology is a historical footnote, nothing more, nothing else. Cryptoeconomics offer a mechanism for bootstrapping companies / systems / protocols / technologies without upfront capital. That is revolutionary, and it is disruptive. Are you familiar with the idea of disruption theory? None of this is anything to do with the value of an asset at any given moment in time, or whether or not its use is as a currency.Do you even Chainlink? Do you even DeFi? Do you even Hashmask? Do you even stablecoin? Do you even yield farm? Do you even supply chain? Do you even digital identity? Do you even care about anything that isn’t a sensationalised clearly uninformed take? What are your thoughts on the emergence of liquidty pools as a way of provisioning capital in a decentralised manner? Tell me 5 use cases for this.
The guy goes on like this for several more paragraphs. He could’ve published his comment as an article by itself, except I don’t think anyone would’ve read it. He knows that. What he did was brandish the alienating language of decentralized finance like a weapon, using it to intimidate someone instead of trying to convince them of its merits.
It’s kind of telling.
For what it’s worth, none of that gibberish is hard to look up or understand — at least on a superficial level. In reality, 90 percent of humans on earth don’t care about crypto-economics.
Here’s the key:
When you put it all in plain English, everything you can do with cryptocurrency is exactly what you can do with any other form of money. The only big difference I see is that it can now happen outside the domain and authority of governments.
In short, a technocracy.
I don’t know if I want keyboard jocks in control of my money, any more than I want Janet Yellen or Jerome Powell. At least with my green paper money, I know I won’t wake up to find out it dropped 20 percent overnight because a billionaire was in a bad mood.
Bitcoin will never go green.
It’s a little surprising that Elon Musk finally became concerned about bitcoin’s environmental impact. Those facts have been around for years, and it makes me wonder if that really explains his turnaround.
See above. (Don’t trust him.)
More broadly, bitcoin’s fans have been writing op-ed pieces for years now excusing its power consumption and attempting to explain it away. Then they do a strange little pivot to concede that while it consumes a lot of power, that fact alone will force everyone toward alternative energy sources in order to support reckless crypto mining.
Well, it’s been a while…
The people setting up crypto mining operations in China and Eastern Europe don’t seem to be making a huge effort to embrace clean energy. How long exactly are we supposed to wait? This is precisely why China has started cracking down on mining operations. They realize that nobody’s actually serious about greening bitcoin. Meanwhile, climate change has arrived. It’s not on our doorstep anymore. It’s sitting in our favorite chair and eating our food. We’re out of time.
We can’t afford to spend the next decade screwing around, trying to figure out how to not ruin the planet further in order to satisfy a bunch of Silicon Valley rejects who want to get rich quick.
Sorry…
Bitcoin has proven its instability.
It’s hard to predict whether bitcoin will die or be resurrected, or give way to altcoins. Here’s what we do know:
A helluva lot people jumped into cryptocurrency without having any idea what they were doing. They were egged on by people who knew better, and now they’re losing money. I feel bad for those who earnestly invested cash they couldn’t afford to lose.
I really do.
I don’t feel bad for people who drove the bubble.
The entire reason bitcoin and dogecoin rose in value this year was because a small handful of billionaires made incredibly public investments, and retail investors flocked to it, thinking this would be their chance to cash in on some easy money. True, some people have manipulated the market exquisitely. They know when to buy and sell.
There’s whales, and sharks.
My point has always been that cryptocurrencies aren’t really what their loudest spokespeople claim to be. Whatever purposes they serve, they’re not here to liberate everyone from traditional fiance. Otherwise, the language and logic itself wouldn’t pose such a barrier to entry. Cryptocurrencies don’t look like they’re here to save anyone. To me, it looks like they’re here to empower a new group in a financial dystopia.
Feel free to spend the next year studying cryptocurrencies as a potential investment tool. In the mean time, stay away from the hype. Keep your money somewhere else. At this rate, inflation will do less damage to your money than trusting someone like Elon Musk.
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